Hostility--Part One

My Facebook feed turned shocking yesterday when the face of someone I've served with on a board of directors appeared in a post from the county sheriff department.  The name given matched the face I recognized.  He was charged with aggravated battery, aggravated assault, and criminal damage to property.  All of the charges were related to an altercation between a resident and a utility company employee who was changing an electric meter on the resident's property.

None of this makes sense to me.  I knew the arrested person (the resident) as a reasonable, hardworking man who was active in his church.  His wife is a sweet lady.  The comments on Facebook were overwhelmingly hostile to the resident.  Then again, the resident's behavior was apparently outrageously hostile toward the workman.

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Hostility came up often in my thoughts today.  Election era politics is full of it.  While I intentionally distance myself from most of the rhetoric, I can't help hearing it repeatedly.

I've also been reaching for an article I read recently about where the "hostility era" began.  I'm pretty sure it was somewhat oversimplified, but it made some sense to me.  Further comments will be based on what I remember from the article, what I remember from life before and after the "hostility era" and what I dig up from research now.

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The resident I mentioned earlier is close to my age.  His appearance when I first knew him suggested loyalty to tenets of the hippie era.  I suspect that in later life those tendencies morphed into other kinds of anti-establishment ideals and expressions.

In the American public milieu now, anti-establishment rhetoric comes predominantly from strident conservatives.  I suspect that's where the "resident" found fodder for his gun-rights, property rights, and personal rights ideals--presuming that his actions were based on ideals of any kind.

Another possibility is that the "resident" was "off his meds" as one person speculated in the Facebook comments.  I do know that after working well at the same job for many years, he was laid off from that job for reasons that did not seem justifiable to him or to me when he told me about it.  I don't know anything about his employment since then.  I only know that he aspired to grow produce, which he had done successfully earlier.

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Further elaboration on the hostility era will have to wait for another post.